


Bet Your Bottom Dollar

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Traumatized Dick Grayson, Worried Parent Bruce Wayne, hey remember that time devin grayson did that to dick, well i didn't undo it i just gave him some hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 00:39:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17971160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Dick's been having kind of a hard time, recently. When it boils over, Bruce is there for him.





	1. When I'm Stuck With a Day, That's Gray, and Lonely

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, yeah, check the bottom A/N for further warnings, it's Like That this time.
> 
> One of my dear friends guessed the fucking name of this fic because I mentioned Annie, and I'm really fucking pissed. She just reached into my brain and nabbed that shit, it's crazy.

Dick had this thing, when he was younger—as a kid, he’d thought that if Bruce left his sight, if he couldn’t reach out and grab him, maybe the ground beneath Bruce would fall away and Dick wouldn’t see him again. When he was nine, up until he was around thirteen, Dick was grafted to Bruce’s side every second he possibly could be; he would hold Bruce’s hand to cross the street, he was cartwheeling around the study when Bruce had work that needed to be done. On days where Dick’s ears were ringing with his parents’ screams and that awful  _ crack _ Bruce would heft him up, and Dick would loop his arms around Bruce’s neck and hang there all day. When he had nightmares, Bruce let Dick lay on his chest and rise and fall with his breathing, listening to the solid, slow thud of his heart.

 

Bruce never commented on it. He never said a word. Any time he couldn’t have Dick tied to him at the hip, he’d say, _ I’ll be back, chum, _ with this look on his face like he’d swallowed a lemon that Dick would later understand was guilt. When he came back, Dick would run and crash into him and shout,  _ Bruce! Bruce! You took forever!  _ and then there was that warm, deep chuckle that felt like the sound behind every scene of Dick’s childhood, right with  _ thud… thud… thud— _ and in all that time, Bruce never said a word, not even as Dick got older, not even to ask Dick why he had felt the need to have Bruce’s constant attention, because inexplicably Bruce knew. Bruce just knew things, impossibly. Dick sometimes wondered if he was even the World’s Greatest Detective at all, because Bruce never seemed to do much searching, just seeing with his preternatural sight—like someone had plucked out the eyes of an eagle and dropped them into Bruce’s skull right when he was born. Dick had needed that knowing more than anything else in the world. More than anything in the world he had needed someone who would stare at him with eagle eyes no matter how loud Dick screamed, no matter how hard Dick cried, no matter how hard Dick tried to hide—he needed someone who would carefully rub antibiotic salve on the raw, red welts where Dick had scratched his skin unconsciously until it bled, and someone who wouldn’t look at him as if he’d lost his mind because of it.  _ Things will get better for you.  _ And they did. They did. The world unfolded again like a gold flower, and maybe this time instead of living for the spotlight he was living for the moonlight, but a new life is a life all the same. Bruce had been the very thing he had needed, back then. 

 

But if Bruce had been everything Dick had needed, it was curious, then, that Dick would fail him the way he did. It was the most vicious kind of failure, a failure of everything Bruce stood for; the kind and steady belief that people can return from the evil they do, and that  _ justice  _ doesn’t mean  _ death, _ that guns are weapons used for death and death only. There was blood on his hands. He had taken that gold flower he’d been given and ground it beneath his heel, he’d—he’d practically spat on it. There was blood on his hands. Dick could make a bulleted list a hundred miles long, of all the ways he’d failed Bruce, of the ways he’d failed everyone he knew—it made him want to claw off his own skin, unzip it, boil away because he couldn’t stand living in it a second longer—there was blood on his hands. His ears were ringing. His ears were ringing and they wouldn’t stop. A shot had gone off and it was always going off.

 

“—Nightwing! What the—”

 

It was a sharp voice and loud but it drifted and slurred like oil poured onto glass _ —focus. _ A shot had gone off. The ground in front of him. Red carpet. No—white carpet, now red. His gloves—bright blue slash—red infecting it. Blood on his hands, on his knuckles, on his—blood on his hands. Next would be the rooftop—he clenched his fists and blood squelched between his fingers. He relaxed them and blood dripped down. In the tent that night Bruce had jumped from the stands and ran over to grab Dick where he stood at the bottom of the pole, had tucked Dick’s head into his shoulder so he didn’t see, but he wasn’t fast enough for Dick to miss that glimpse of his father’s neck snapping and his skull splattering out across the ground. Blood everywhere. If Bruce hadn’t pulled him away Dick wondered if he’d have rushed to the bodies, if their blood would be on his hands, too, mingling with the litres and litres of it that dripped down—pariah by death,  _ pariah by death— _ and here it rained all the time. Here it rained all the time and the only smell was the bloody rain, the only sight was the fog of breath in the air. Here was a place that was lethal and would live forever inside him. 

 

There was a hand on his shoulder and Dick reacted before he knew, snatching the wrist and twisting back where his other arm grabbed the area of flesh just before the armpit and he forced upwards and threw them—nails digging into his skin, the hands dragging down from his shoulder and down his stomach and a playful swirl in the trail of hair low on his belly, the complete and total defeat that lived in all of him that said  _ even if they’re not dead I’ve lost them forever  _ and he didn’t move, after that. No strength to. No reason to. And the insidious little secret he carried in him—

 

“—forget he’s that strong, sometimes.”

 

“Because you are an  _ imbecile.”  _

 

“Red Robin, Robin—back to work,  _ now.  _ Get me that sniper. Protect each other. If I hear a single complaint out of either of you, you’ll regret ever opening your mouth.”

 

“But—”

 

“Get  _ out,” _ and Dick knew that snarl, that bone-chilling sound. 

 

“Bruce,” he mumbled. “Bruce.”

 

There was a tension and then another snapped, “I said  _ now!” _ which was followed by a rustling and the snap of leather and the deceptive lightness of highly-trained footsteps. 

 

“Look at me,” impossibly soft. 

 

_ My eyes are open,  _ Dick wanted to say, but they weren’t. He didn’t remember closing them. He didn’t remember opening them, either, but then he was staring into Batman’s white lenses. His brain skipped tracks. Bad record. Broken record, maybe, because always it crawled toward the here, always it lived in the rain. 

 

“Don’t touch me,” Dick choked out. “Don’t—you’ll—I’ll hurt—”

 

“You won’t hurt me.” 

 

It was said with such an iron certainty that Dick, for that moment, believed it too—believed that there was no knife he could push into Bruce’s chest that would actually meet its mark instead of glancing off Bruce’s indomitable will. Believed that maybe there was no knife, that Dick was holding, that there was no motion he could make to push it through Bruce’s chest. Bruce was with him, somehow, and his shoulders blocked out the rain, because Dick couldn’t feel it anymore, but of course—and now that he was considering, maybe it had not been there at all. Maybe it was only raining outside. Then Bruce gently teased away his hands—why was he scratching at his arms, even through the kevlar?—and pulled a cloth out of his belt. He wiped away the blood carefully, thoroughly, with a touch like a feather, over Dick’s knuckles and down the lengths of his fingers.

 

Bruce cupped Dick’s hands in both of his and squeezed. “Good as new.”

 

“No, it’s not. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not, I killed him—you can’t… you can’t.”

 

There was a long moment where Batman’s white eyes bore into Dick, puzzling through the words and somehow, inexplicably, fitting them together in the right order. Eagle-eyed.

 

“Blockbuster,” Bruce said, “has been dead for years now. Your name is Richard John Grayson. It’s September eighteenth. You have a little brother, Damian Wayne. Robin. Do you remember?”

 

“Tim. Tim’s Robin,” Dick said. “No. No. No.”

 

Bruce’s thumb stroked over the bone of one of Dick’s knuckles. “Remember your Robin,” he said. 

 

It was like breaking through the water’s surface and taking in that first sweet gasp of air. Damian’s voice, that had been  _ Damian’s _ voice earlier, haughty but already starting to crack because Damian was thirteen, and starting the slide down into puberty, and Blockbuster had been years ago. Years ago now and Dick was still—he was still. Unmoving, left in the here. There was a body pressed against him and he wasn’t moving an inch. Always that secret—

 

“Count.”

 

Bruce’s hand raised, and he held up one finger, and Dick breathed in. He held up a second finger and Dick breathed out. Dick had no idea how long they sat there, counting, but the black-and-white film at the edges of his vision slowly seeped away, and Dick became aware of the rest of his body. Aching, from being crouched on the floor, his head pounding, the twisting and churning in his stomach.

 

“Are you ready to stand,” Bruce said. His hand had dropped down to cup Dick’s, again, and Dick was infinitely grateful for that one small grounding gesture. 

 

“Yeah. Might barf,” Dick said, quietly.

 

“That’s alright.” Bruce slid an arm beneath Dick’s, and Dick’s arm fell into its natural place across Bruce’s shoulders. “Up.”

 

“I can’t.”

 

Batman looked down at him with his white glare, two eyes glinting, reflecting the weak lamp in the corner. The bat spread across his chest seemed to burn. “Get up,” Batman said, but his voice wasn’t hard, or cruel—it was expectant. Ruthlessly expectant, but only expectant. Dick’s legs moved of their own accord. Bruce’s arm stayed strong against him.

 

“We’re going out the window,” Bruce said. “We need to hurry. The GCPD are on their way. Focus. How are you getting down from here?”

 

Dick shook his head, hair tickling his ears—outside it was raining, but there was no rooftop, only white marble path below them and viciously pruned trees. “Where are we?”

 

“The Mayor’s mansion.”

 

Dick nodded. “Following a—a lead. A bookie going to meet with Hill. But someone knew we were here, and knew we were taping it, and—but how would anyone get that intel? Unless… unless they  _ didn’t _ get that intel, and—”

 

“Our illustrious mayor has backed himself into quite the corner. But we can’t afford to be caught here. What little element of surprise we have is at stake and we need to get out of here quickly. Oracle has already blocked the security feed and set it to a loop and we have minutes before that loop ends. Nightwing _ —focus.” _

 

Dick leaned his head out of the window, peering around. There wasn’t anywhere to hook or tie a grapple that wouldn’t do obvious damage that could connect them to the scene, unless—

 

“There’s an oak tree out there,” Dick said. “We’ll hit the ground hard, but on grass instead of brick, and the ground’s soft from all the rain anyway. We’ll probably break the the branch, but in a storm this bad no one will look twice at it. But that’s only if you’re a good enough shot to make it.”

 

“I can make it,” Bruce grunted, and Dick would swear up and down he landed the shot out of spite. 

 

They did, true to Dick’s words, hit the ground hard—but Bruce had somehow maneuvered it so that Dick would land on top of him. It took Bruce a fraction of a second longer to pull himself off the ground that it ordinarily would have, so Dick figured the fall must’ve hurt. They made good time off the grounds, but Bruce didn’t ease up until he smashed a streetlight with his grapple and waited in the dark space for the Batmobile to come roaring by. The autopilot was good but didn’t really account for objects well, which had hilariously once taken out a construction crane, so Bruce tried to avoid using it—mostly out of concern for the safety of others, rather than the safety of the Batmobile. At some point when Dick was young Bruce got tired of making constant repairs, and had spent about five years designing and building a new car that was essentially a tank that looked nothing like a tank but still  _ incredibly _ cool. If a metaphorical bomb were dropped on Gotham City, the only surviving structure would probably be the Batmobile. So the autopilot function was kind of a double-edged sword.

 

When they slid into the car, Bruce jammed the button on the console that connected him to the comm channel. Dick had always appreciated that he’d made the button underlights blue. It was peaceful, calming. Which was hilarious, given that most conversations with Bruce alone in the Batmobile made people want to punch something. “Tell me good news.”

 

“Uh,” was Tim’s smart reply.

 

Dick winced as he watched the look on Bruce’s jaw go from standard grimness to absolutely glacial. “Please tell me that was a noise of self-restraint, because you’re filled with so much joy at having caught our sniper that you are struggling to breathe.”

 

“Listen,  _ Robin—” _

 

“Shut  _ up, _ Drake!” Damian screeched, voice so high-pitched Dick’s eardrums must’ve been bleeding. “You are projecting your shortcomings onto me! It was you who suggested we stay together, instead of boxing our quarry in  _ efficiently!”  _

 

“Maybe I didn’t want you to  _ kill _ him, you little—”

 

Dick had just enough time to think  _ this is about to go to hell _ before it did go to hell. Rather than simply go to hell, however, it swanned spectacularly to hell, like a bird with a broken wing swirling down through the sky to an earthly demise:

 

“If you so much as even think to finish that sentence I will make you do a  _ thousand _ push-ups with an encyclopedia on your back. Or five. You’re both benched for a week. Effective immediately. During that time you’ll run suicides at 6AM and 6PM every day, and if you say a single word about it you will run harder. I am  _ out  _ of patience.” And then Bruce cut the connection with a wordless growl. 

 

Dick waited a couple minutes, until they were nearly at the Manor, to say, “You could… go a little easier on them. It’s my fault that they don’t get along, really—it’s me. You should be yelling at me.”

 

Bruce turned from staring out at the asphalt that stretched before them to stab Dick with lenses that reflected the blue light of the Batmobile’s console, eyes that looked like a ghost’s. “If I hear you say that something is your fault one more time you will wash your mouth out with soap.” 

 

“Shut up, it’s the truth,” Dick said. “Damian’s protective over Robin, okay? You know that. He needs it, a lot. And—I took it away from Tim. I didn’t handle it well, that’s on me. Take it easy.”

 

“And yet that still does not make how they treat each other your fault. Their actions are their own. If you take responsibility for what they do, they never will.”

 

“Whatever. I just don’t think punishing them is going to help,” Dick said. 

 

Bruce grunted. “They allowed that fighting to happen in pursuit of an armed target, who—for all we know—might not have been alone. They could have died. And I will make damn sure they remember it.”

 

Dick turned to the window, watching buildings fly by from behind glass that could stop a .50 caliber round. There was a day when Bruce was more lenient with mistakes, but Dick supposed that was also because Dick never left Bruce’s side, as a Robin. As far as Dick knew, Jason hadn’t, either. Over the years he’d pieced together a pretty good picture of the day Jason died. How even in all the time he’d been away from Bruce, he’d been fine, and then Bruce had left Jason in what he’d thought were caring arms, and Bruce had been able to save everyone except the person he loved most. Bruce’s problem was that he was a fucking hypocrite.

 

“You didn’t kill Jason,” Dick said.

 

The way his mind was skittering around, he hadn’t realized he’d said it out loud until he heard Bruce’s snarled, “What.” It wasn’t something he would have said, especially now, when Bruce was still simmering with anger, but his head—it hadn’t screwed on right. 

 

“Um, I’m sorry,” Dick said, words tumbling out his mouth. “For what happened earlier. I think I need, uh, sleep.”

 

“That,” Bruce said, easing the Batmobile to the shoulder, the smooth easy stop, “and about ten other things.” 

 

“But what you were saying, earlier—you’re kind of being hypocritical. Because I know you think you’re the reason Jason died, but you didn’t  _ make _ the Joker kill him, and like you said, you can’t take responsibility for the actions of other people.”

 

“I think that is a conversation that’s a lot more complicated than you believe it is, and it is definitely not the one we’re having now.”

 

Dick leaned his head to see out the window, and saw nothing but long black trees stretching upwards toward a blacker sky. The back road to the Manor was surrounded by nothing but woods. “Why are we stopped in the middle of nowhere, exactly?”

 

If possible, the set of Bruce’s jaw got grimmer. “I explained to you years ago that there is one thing I will not forgive.”

 

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dick hissed, and it seemed every muscle in his body tightened. His heart jumped into his throat and sat there like a frog, and he scanned over every important thing he could remember Bruce saying—but maybe it hadn’t been a word, maybe an action, maybe a look—

 

_ “You _ are infinitely precious. And yet I watched you come here tonight, despite the fact that you clearly haven’t been sleeping. You most likely haven’t eaten, either.”

 

Dick sat back, eyebrows raised so high his mask distorted with them. “You’re lecturing  _ me _ on taking care of myself. You. You are. You’re the one saying this.”

 

Bruce huffed. “You say that like I’ve never lectured you before.”

 

“You have, and every single time you just get more and more hypocritical. It’s just been a hard couple weeks, that’s all.” 

 

_ A hard couple weeks _ meant jerking awake every night, sweating and breathing hard and in the dark there were shadows, and they looked like people, people bound to put their hands on him—it was eating and throwing it up five minutes later because he caught a smell of his own sweat, it was the costume tucked in his closet, mocking him, the one that on the days he could wear it felt like a prison and on the days he couldn’t it felt like freedom. If  _ a hard couple weeks _ was an anagram of  _ losing your goddamn mind, _ then maybe Dick wasn’t lying through his teeth.

 

And a beat later Dick remembered who he was looking at, whose eagle eyes those were, and knew that Bruce had seen every bit of that on his face, had read it like an open book. There was a silence where they just looked at each other, Bruce with that same expectant stillness, and Dick with shoulders that slowly dropped until he looked as exhausted as he felt. 

 

“I’ll ask Alfred to make blueberry pancakes for breakfast,” Bruce said, finally. 

 

“Yeah,” Dick mumbled. “Yeah.” 


	2. I Stick Out My Chin, and Grin, and Say

They ended up being delicious blueberry pancakes, not that Dick expected any different. 

 

Dick had this thing, when he was younger—as a kid, he’d thought that if Bruce left his sight, if he couldn’t reach out and grab him, maybe the ground beneath Bruce would fall away and Dick wouldn’t see him again. Somehow, now, Dick had slid that familiar fear into a new skin. Where Bruce went, he went; where Bruce wasn’t, he wasn’t. When they rested on the couch Dick ended up with his head pillowed on Bruce’s shoulder, curled into Bruce’s side. When Dick rocketed awake with the feeling of lips on his skin, he slunk through the house until he found wherever Bruce was hiding, and inevitably Bruce would end up tucking a blanket over Dick’s shoulders and pressing the ghost of a kiss into his hair.  Bruce’s schedule became Dick’s schedule. Dick even followed him into the office, the days that Bruce actually had to go. 

 

“But if you put pineapple on pizza, I mean, where does it end?” Dick said. “What if you started putting strawberries on pizza?”

 

Bruce had picked off all of his pineapples and arranged them in the center of a folded slice of pizza. He tilted his head sideways to bite into it, looking for all the world like a very regular man eating pizza very regularly.

 

Dick nodded to himself. “Yeah, see, pizza tacos. The abominations don’t stop. You’re an absolute animal.”

 

Bruce huffed. “I would eat strawberries on pizza.”

 

“Oh, yeah, of course you would, you’re a fucking animal. Does Alfred ever look at you and be like,  _ did I raise him after all? Did clones come and steal my Bruce and replace him with a carbon copy? _ Because you’re a monster, over there.” 

 

“You didn’t specify pizza with tomato sauce. It could be a chocolate pizza.”

 

Dick sipped his water thoughtfully. “Y’know, chocolate pizza actually sounds good.”

 

Bruce’s phone vibrated, rattling against the wood of the desk. He grabbed it and frowned, deeply. “Dick, get Gene’s attention for me.” 

Dick pushed himself off the edge of the desk, walked across the room, and ducked his head out of the office door. “Hey, Gene. I think someone’s broken in. There’s a guy sitting at Bruce Wayne’s desk, eating all my pizza in the wrongest way to eat pizza, and he wants your attention.”

 

Gene, a burly ex-con with a gray beard down to his belly and tattoos curling over his skull, grinned. “No problem, Mr. Richard. Show me where this tough guy’s at.”

 

Dick pulled the door open and held it for him. “Right this way, Crushbone.” 

 

Bruce looked up from his phone, sharply. “Hi, Gene. I have an interview tomorrow that slipped my mind. I need that rescheduled.” 

 

“Right away, man.”

 

“Thank you. You know my schedule better than I do. That should do it, I think. As long as you forward me those project updates before you leave, you can head home whenever.”

 

“I ain’t got a single issue with that, my man. Take care, Mr. Wayne.”

 

“You too, Gene.”

 

Dick held the door for Gene, and fistbumped the man on the way out. “I always liked that guy,” Dick said, dropping in a chair in front of Bruce’s desk. “Why’d you cancel the interview?”   
  


“There’s a sting planned for tomorrow,” Bruce said. “Someone’s spreading extra-terrestrial narcotics, which has led to the death of twenty-three people. The human body wasn’t designed for these kinds of drugs.”   
  


“So that’s what you’ve been so busy with.” Dick folded his hands behind his head. It seemed like he’d spent more time lounging near Bruce in the Cave this past couple of days than anywhere else; Bruce was always bent over something, frowning either at the Batcomputer’s monitor, or into a microscope, or over some paper files he’d pulled from the forest of filing cabinets tucked into the corner of the Cave. Bruce had always found paper files safer than digital, the paranoid asshole. The worst part was that the most sensitive files were written in code, which made accessing high security files Dick’s least favorite part of the job.

 

“I sent samples to Clark and Hal to verify extra-terrestrial origin. The results are conclusive.”

 

Dick laughed. “And how the hell did you get Hal to analyze anything for you?”

 

Bruce looked pointedly at his phone, flicking through something. Probably emails. “I promised to get drunk with him. Apparently Oliver’s been telling stories of when I was younger, and now Hal has a desire to drink me under the table.”

 

Dick’s eyebrows shot to his hairline. “You’re definitely faking that one, huh.”

 

Bruce’s mouth quirked upwards. “A magician never reveals his secrets.”

 

“Do you need any help tonight?” Dick asked. “I’ve been taking it easy for too long, honestly. I need a little action.”

 

“I’ll be just fine, Dick.”

 

There was something in his face that stabbed Dick in the stomach. Something patronizing, something belittling. “What, do you think I’m not ready?”

 

“I said nothing of the sort,” Bruce said, not looking up from his phone. “Don’t presume.”

 

Rage flooded Dick, faster than he thought possible. He was speaking before he knew it: “That’s always what you think. You’ve been thinking that this  _ whole time. _ That I’m incompetent, that I can’t take care of myself—I’ve been looking out for your ass for years! How many times have I saved your life?”

 

“On innumerable occasions,” Bruce said, and finally looked up from his phone. His brows were pinched in concern. “Dick, I didn’t—”

 

“Innumerable! It’s fucking _ innumerable!  _ And still you’re treating me like—like I’m a baby, like I can’t do anything, like I can’t—”

 

—move. Like he couldn’t move. The world went gray and white and gray and white all over. Everything stopped, folded in itself, turned to slow-moving static on a slow-moving television screen light years from the place he stood on Earth. He lived by fractions that divided infinitely in upon themselves. Fractions of a second, infinitesimal, and he waded through them like gray on white snowdrifts. In those fractions of a second hands were running up his sides, too soft for how much they burned —they should have claws like a white bear, in those fractions of a second he saw a black maw yawn before him and lips closed on his and if he laid just still enough, she’d be riding a graying corpse.

 

“Dick? Dick! Where are you going—”

 

His vision tunneled. His skin was raw, oversensitive, as if hands and lips were constantly running over him, like the smell of the rain that invaded everything and crawled into his brain and lived there, in the here. He had keys in his hand and they were sharp and cold and not warm. He pressed the panic button,  _ click, _ followed the noise,  _ honk honk honk, _ and plugged them into the car,  _ klitch. _ He peeled out of the parking garage and on the street, and he kept going, and he kept going, near motionless in his seat but his car chugging along at sixty, seventy miles an hour. Near motionless and still moving. There was an upward and a downward thrust. 

 

He’d let Tarantula shoot Blockbuster. For years, that had been his only crime of the night—what happened after was the after, a fuzzy liminal space that didn’t seem to exist even if you squinted. Murder of omission had turned into a rape of—and time only existed in those fractions of a second. Everything moved so slow that around the Earth the galaxies outside died and were reborn a hundred times over. His eyes and his hand worked together, without ever registering what, exactly, he was doing. He was gone and that was it.

 

Bright headlights flashed, and Dick swerved out of the way. He’d over-corrected, and it took some frantic steering to straighten the car out, but by the end of it he knew suddenly it was dark outside, he was surrounded by trees, and he had not a single fucking clue where he was. 

 

His breathing picked up in a way that was grating to his own ears, heavy panting that only needed the thick smell of sex to be complete, so he pulled the car haphazardly into the parking lot of a small gas station and dug out his phone. It took several tries to hit the call button, because his hands were shaking.

 

“Bruce,” he choked out, when the phone picked up. “Bruce, Bruce—I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”   
  


“Easy, chum,” Bruce said, softly. His voice was deep enough that it was distorted, weirdly, by his phone. “Easy. Where are you?”

 

“Somewhere. Somewhere. Middle of nowhere. I’m sorry, I took the car and I just—oh, God, I can’t breathe—”

 

“Robin,” Bruce snapped. “What’s in front of you? Describe it. I want details.”

 

“Black leather dashboard. I’m in a parking lot. The lamp’s orange and flickering. There’s one other car here. It’s a red pickup with duct tape holding the left side view mirror on. There are two gas pumps, but one has an out of order sign taped to it. It’s on neon green paper written with sharpie and taped on with patterned duct tape. It looks like a camouflage pattern.”

 

“Good. Can you tell me about the building?” Bruce asked. There was a faint sound of honking over the phone.

 

“Are you  _ driving?”  _

 

Bruce grunted. “Yes. I’ve been tracking you. I’m an hour behind. I had to stop at the Manor for a car.”

 

Dick winced. “I’m sorry.”

 

“You’ve not wrecked it. You’re forgiven.”

 

Dick shook his head. “You didn’t have to come out here for me. Christ, you’ve got the thing tomorrow — ”   
  


“You are my child,” Bruce said, as if that explained it. Something warm sparked in Dick’s chest. “Now tell me about the building.”

 

Bruce kept him on the phone until he pulled up beside Dick, in the black Maserati. It gleamed under the orange light, out of place in a ramshackle gas station in the middle of nowhere. Bruce opened the driver’s door for him. Dick hadn’t moved, from where he was curled up in the seat. “Leave the keys in the glove compartment. I’ll pay someone to drive it back.” 

 

“Someone could steal it.”   
  


“Good for them. Hop up, chum.”

 

Dick pulled himself out of the seat—his limbs were awkward and shaky, but Bruce was wrapping a fleece throw blanket around him like a cape and then Dick was crying into Bruce’s shoulder, clinging to Bruce’s turtleneck like his life depended on it. The transition was nearly seamless. Dick hadn’t even realized he was crying until he was sobbing, and it was only Bruce’s arms around him holding him up.

 

“I let it happen,” Dick mumbled. “I let it—I stopped moving. I deserved it, I deserved it, you know that? I didn’t… I let it happen.”

 

Bruce had gone carefully still. If he was breathing, Dick couldn’t feel it. “What happened,” he said, flatly. Almost cold. 

 

“I—you know,” Dick said, helplessly, desperately. “You know.”

 

“Is it a four letter word.” 

 

Dick swallowed, and didn’t say anything at all. Bruce’s arms around him were suddenly bruising, and a hand had found its way up to cup Dick’s head, and Bruce was murmuring heartbroken things like, “Oh, baby.” Bruce rubbed his back in the warm, solid way he’d done when Dick was a kid, until Dick had sobbed until he was just heaving because no more tears would come. And despite it all, despite being in what was, essentially, the middle of nowhere, despite all of the precarious unknowns, Dick had never felt as safe as he did in that moment. It was a faith in Batman only Robin could have.

 

Bruce propped open the door of the Maserati and pulled out a baby wipe from the glove compartment. “Wipe your face,” he said. “We’re going inside.”

 

“I don’t want to.”

 

Bruce raised a brow. “Dick. If I leave you outside now, you won’t be there when I get back.”

 

Dick looked hard at his shoes. “Fine,” he said, snatching the wipe and scrubbing off his nose and chin, until they burned and hurt, and the pain felt good. 

 

“Easy,” Bruce said, tugging it out of his hand. “If you’re going to hurt yourself, I’ll do it for you.” Bruce pulled out another wipe and carefully swept under Dick’s eyes and over his cheeks. Dick was already too embarrassed to care much —he just closed his eyes and leaned into it. Bruce tilted his head forward, carefully, and kissed his crown, like he did when Dick was just a kid. 

 

Bruce gripped Dick’s hand and led him inside the store. Inside, he gestured to a row of chapsticks. “Pick the one that smells the most.” 

 

“I hate smelly chapstick.”

 

“That’s not the point. Go ahead, pick.”

 

Dick tested all of them until he settled on a particularly garish raspberry blend. They repeated the process with deodorant, and then Bruce threw in baby oil, listerine spray, and four king size packs of Reese’s cups. The clerk that rang them up gave them curious looks, but said nothing. 

 

Bruce dumped the bag at Dick’s feet, and pulled out of the parking lot, curving down the street. Dick swallowed back apprehension. Bruce hadn’t said anything, had passed no judgement. There was no anger, or screaming, just calm, cool collectedness. Dick shouldn’t have expected anything else, really, from a man who could convince most people he was an automaton. 

 

Bruce dialed his phone. “Hi, yes. I need a double immediately. Yes, I understand you’re closed for the night, but I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Bruce Wayne.”

 

Dick could hear the yelp on the phone from the other side of the car, and he grinned to himself. Exorbitant wealth had exorbitant benefits, and they pulled into a hotel parking lot just past midnight.

 

“You’ve a bag in the backseat. I packed it for you. There’s pillows, too.”

 

“You really packed for the long haul,” Dick said.

 

Bruce’s hip popped audibly as he stepped out of the car, but Dick was too exhausted to make a joke about it. “Never be caught unprepared.”

 

They checked in. Dick figured they must look rather pathetic, the two of them. Bruce had snot and tear stains over one side of his turtleneck, and he looked exhausted; Dick’s face was puffy from crying so much, and he was wearing a blanket over his shoulders, clutching a pillow to his chest. But he was so far beyond caring what the doorman thought, it wasn’t even funny. He wanted to fall into a bed and sleep forever. 

 

Bruce led him up to their room, and once they’d dropped all their belongings, Bruce gave him a serious look and dumped the plastic bag of toiletries (and chocolate) on the bed. “You’re not going to like this conversation,” he said. 

 

Dick crossed his legs and sat on the bed opposite of him. His chest felt like someone had poured fire into it. “I don’t think so.”

 

“Odor-evoked autobiographical memory,” Bruce said, waving the tube of chapstick in the air. “You process smell with your olfactory bulb. That’s connected to your amygdala and your hippocampus, areas of the brain that deal in memory and emotion. It’s probably your strongest trigger.”

 

Dick blinked. 

 

“The chapstick is for public areas. It is a distracting smell. Everything here functions to mask any smell that gets too intense. If that smell is imagined, it gives your olfactory bulb something real to do.” 

 

“It’s… Bruce, it’s not as bad as all that.”

 

Bruce stared at him. “Dick. We’re in Pennsylvania. You drove to another state without knowing it.”

 

Dick looked away. Why did hotels always have the shittiest art? Damian could do better with his eyes closed. “It’s not even like this! I didn’t even think about it, not really. Because it’s not even a thing, not really.”

 

“Delayed responses are normal.”

 

“That’s not fucking  _ normal!” _ Dick shouted. “Stop—stop acting like this is  _ normal, _ I know it’s not—it’s my fault!”

 

Bruce eyes turned to ice. He flicked his finger. “Come here.”

 

Dick pulled himself off the bed. “What now?”

 

Bruce pointed to the bathroom. “Soap. Wash out your mouth.”

 

“What? No, that’s stupid.” 

 

Bruce crossed his arms. “You will do it, now. Unless you want to face the consequences.”

 

Dick stared at him. “You’re serious.”

 

“Deadly. You are my son. I will not hear anyone tell me that my son deserved to be raped. You are going to scrub your mouth out with soap, and then you are going to sit on that bed, and you are going to amend that statement until it is a worthwhile one to make. Are we clear?”

 

Dick ducked his head, ears burning. “Crystal,” he mumbled, miserably. 

 

He pumped soap onto his tongue and scrubbed around with the plastic, hotel-issue toothbrush, watching the clock until two minutes had passed. The taste was bitter, lavender and disgusting, and Dick wondered how long memories about taste lasted in the brain, because surely he wouldn’t be forgetting this one anytime soon. Dick gargled with water and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

 

“Done,” he said. “That was nasty. I can still taste it.”

 

Bruce nodded towards the bed. Dick sat on it heavily. 

 

“Now. What were you trying to say?”

 

“I—” Dick stopped, sucked in a deep breath. “I didn’t deserve… it.”

 

Bruce crossed his arms. “And what did you not deserve?”

 

“I didn’t deserve to be raped,” Dick said, eyes on the floor. His voice was so quiet, it could’ve been a feather falling to the water. 

 

“If you need to hear that… I will tell you. As often as you need.” Bruce sat on the bed beside Dick, elbows on his knees. 

 

Dick pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. “It’s like it just happened. Like it’s new. It’s been years. What damn sense does that make?”

 

“It doesn’t need to make sense. Delayed responses  _ are _ normal.”

Dick let out a shuddering breath, and leaned his head against Bruce’s shoulder. “I hate this,” he said, but it was muffled by the fabric.

 

“Believe it or not, you’ve… done the hard part. The day after is the hardest part.”

 

_ What an odd sentence, _ Dick thought.  _ What an odd, somehow knowing sentence, almost as if— _ and then the pieces fit together, and for once, Dick resented being raised by a detective. 

 

Bruce had realized his misstep a moment before Dick did, because he’d gotten up, crossed over to his bag, was pulling out rattling orange bottles of prescription medication. “We’ll talk more in the morning,” he said, gruffly. 

 

“Hold the fucking phone,” Dick snarled. He made sure it sounded just shocked and angry enough to sell it. “You’ve been researching this. I can tell. Did you know, this whole fucking time, what happened—”

 

“Of course not,” Bruce growled. “If I’d known, we would’ve been having this conversation years—” and Bruce’s sentence cut off with a click of his teeth. 

 

_ Bingo, _ Dick thought. But how he wished he’d been wrong. “I’ll kill them,” he hissed. “I’ll kill them. I’ll do it.”

 

“I’ve had enough,” Bruce said, flatly. He knocked back a handful of pills and took a deep drink from his water bottle. 

 

“Who was it? I’ll—” but Dick’s sentence fell flat, because he’d just watched Bruce wince, at that, and an evil idea had occurred to him. An evil, horrible idea.

 

It was clear that Bruce’s damn eagle-eyes had seen every thought play out on Dick’s face, and he said, “Don’t you dare breathe a word of it to your brother.”

 

Dick flopped back on the bed, eyes burning. “This is fucked up. Oh my god, this is fucked up.”

 

“Dick. Look at me.”   
  


Dick didn’t sit up. He heard Bruce cross the room, and kneel in front of him. A warm hand was on his knee. “Sit up, chum.”

 

Dick pushed himself upright. “This is really fucked up.”

 

Bruce nodded. “Yes. But I can tell you that you’re going to be alright. It takes time, and you have to do it every day. But you’ll be alright, because I was. And you are better than me in every way.” 

 

“I feel like I failed you,” Dick said, nearly inaudibly. 

 

“Never. You could never fail me, chum.”

 

Dick rubbed his watering eyes. “Thank you. Thanks. I mean, uh, really, you’re—you’re the best dad I could’ve had. And you’ve got my word, on Damian.”

 

It was Bruce’s turn to avert his eyes. He stood, and his hip popped again. “I’m getting old,” he huffed. “Get a Reese’s. The other three are mine.”   
  


“How do you get three?” Dick asked, grinning. “Is there any reason you like chocolate so much, or is that just you? I swear you weren’t this bad when I was a kid.” 

 

Bruce was tearing open a pack of peanut butter cups. “Yes. It… is a medicine I take.”

 

Dick jerked. “Seriously?”

 

“Seroquel. It causes sugar cravings.”

 

“The more you know. Toss me one. What does that do?”

 

Bruce tossed him a pack. “It puts me to sleep,” he said, around a mouthful of chocolate. 

 

“Ah, so you take it three times a year, I see.” 

 

Bruce threw a pillow at him. “Quiet, you. Now get some rest. We’ve got a lot of driving to do tomorrow.”

 

“Man down, man down,” Dick said, holding the pillow over his face. “How will I ever recover from such a strike! Man down!” 

 

Bruce was already sliding beneath his comforter, a small pile of Reese’s sitting beside him, furthest away from Dick, like he was guarding it. “Brat,” he said. 

 

Dick looked across the expanse between them, for a moment, and then crossed it, huddling up beneath the comforter. 

 

“This is not a bed big enough for the both of us.” 

 

“That’s because you gave half of it to your Reese’s, scooch your booch.” 

 

Bruce was out ten minutes later, but Dick sat there awhile, wondering why it was that his life and Bruce’s life seemed to be distant mirrors of the other—but eventually his eyes drifted shut, and he was peacefully asleep, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings include: rape aftermath, rape is never shown on screen but snippets and details from Dick's memory are, and also Bruce loves his son. He just do. He just do!
> 
> So part two of this, at the time I'm posting part one, is open in another tab and getting ferociously wrapped up and the editing process primed and ready to go. So you shouldn't have to wait too long, for the second part. Why am I breaking it into two parts? I Want To.


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